Famously, the British Railway system was halted some while back by “the wrong kind of snow”.

Not really comparable, it actually was a different ( not ‘wrong’ ) sort of snow and it got into the engine compartments of diesel electrics and buggered up the inverters, the problem’s been largely rectified now. I suspect that with wind turbines the problem is more systemic and the very quality of wind which is supposed to make it so useful is precisely why it isn’t.
Anyway who’s laughing ? I’m not, really….snort.

One actually must praise the photographer, too. It cannot have been an easy shot to get.

News organisations will often sell nice high resolution prints of their pictures for a small fee. I don’t know where this one came from. It might be a frame from a video, too, in which case high resolution might not exist.

I am not speaking from knowledge, just educated guesses. With blades that long, a mechanism to control the pitch (propeller angle of attack( could be pretty difficult. An alternative would be to simply lock them down or have some brake that is supposed to hold. If the brake was not rated for the forces due to 160mph wind, then you’d get something much like what happens when you drive your car with the emergency brake on. It gets red hot. Grease burns. With the amount of energy and the composites involved in these beasts, it could easily be enough to set other things on fire as well.

‘No need for a brake, just a clutch which lets out when the speed gets too high, letting the blades spin but disconnected from the turbine.’

Congratulations, you just encountered the classic dilemma of the windmill through the ages.

The idea of a free-wheel clutch is great – until you realize that you must now design the bearings and the blades and everything that rotates to withstand essentially-unlimited speeds, torques and centrifugal forces. It’s easy for a turbine this big to go supersonic at the blade tips with no load. Think about how you woauld have to buiuld the thing to withstand those sorts of forces. They would get too big and too heavy to work efficiently – or at all – at normal wind speeds. Your clutch also needs to be absolutely gigantic to be able to operate the sorts of speeds and torques involved. Same goes for a brake – any brake large enough to control a turbine like this once it’s running would make it impracticably-huge and expensive. As with almost-all windmills, the working load is the main braking system, and since you can’t decide to pop a windmill onto or off the grid at a moment’s notice, that control is effectively compromised. The very worst thing you can do with a windmill is let it run free, because now you have absolutely no way to get it back under control.

A windmill is easy to control when it is stopped, hard to control when it is running, and virtually impossible to bring back under control once it has exceeded its operating parameters. Dutch windmillers knew this 300 years ago, and the rules have not changed since.

The turbine that burned turned itself out of the wind and ended up backwinded (watch the video) and the blades were falling apart long before the fire would have brought it down. Something happened long before the video began that caused this to happen. I suspect that the braking mechanism (whatever it is) did not engage and the thing was wildly out of control long before the video began or the fire broke out. The fire was a consequence, not the cause of the failure.

I suspect (but obviously cannot prove) that these turbines are not being designed to last a long time and withstand all the viccisitudes of nature becasue that’s not where the money is.

I thought that part of the fraud about Global Warming was that if it’s too windy, they have to turn the damn things off. Seems like even at two million each the pretty things are very sensitive to, er, too much wind.

Of course, the other way to look at the photo is that either the wind turbine stored too much power (the curse of being too successful- the power couldn’t go anywhere) or we have uncovered a secret defence plan- a missile launcher that looks like a turbine! But which had a malfunction.

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